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Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

$65B seems oddly specific - could it be that they just set the liquidation limit for Alameda's account to 65,535 (max 16bit unsigned int), in millions of dollars?

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Reading between the lines (and pattern matching), my interpretation is it’s likely a line that prevents balances going below zero. The number was an account number which was exempted from that particular check.

The $65B figure probably leads somewhere else and sounds like it would be counting bitcoins which peaked at over $65k per coin.

If there was some other limit that prevented his balance from falling below -$1M BTC, then Alameda “had access to” over $65B in credit (in October 2021)

It feels more likely that he just chose $65B rather than an exchange using unsigned 16 bit integers to do accounting.

This is FTX, remember.

This is less of a "haha FTX so dumb" and more of a "how could that possibly ever hang together for 2 years??"

Nah, seems like they'd be more likely to use floats for accounting.

Not quite the worst use for floats, bad though that would be.

I've received a few SMSes over the pandemic that used a float for their caller ID.

Not sure why the German Federal government chose to identify itself as "+4.4786E+11" when welcoming me into the country (actually me switching my UK SIM card to no-longer-Airplane-mode) and telling me to quarantine and test.

I recently recieved an email from Phillips (re CPAP recall) which said "In the meantime, your device registration confirmation number is 2.02xxxxE+15." [some digits obscurred by me, although they dropped some of the trailing digits].

a 16 bit unsigned integer with a unit of a million dollars, a very odd choice indeed

Pretty sure their whole stack was in Python

Their tech team almost exclusively came from Jane Street, wouldn’t it be OCaml?

OCaml still wouldn't have 16 bit ints.

Uint8.t ;)

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